Lt. Ed Lewis and Scott McAlister are shown at a local day care showing the students that firefighters are not people to be afraid of and teaching the students about fire safety during a friendly firefighter session.

Ed Lewis is known to many people in McDuffie County as a public safety worker, but he also has a giving heart.
“There are two types of people -- givers and takers,” Lewis said. “I’m a giver.”
Lewis, a Thomson native, has been a member of the fire service for 35 years and in EMS for 29 years.
“I was inspired by Captain Richard Pastor,” Lewis said. “He was the captain of the Thomson Fire Department for more than 30 years, and I saw him in a parade when I was a kid. He was the only African American in the fire service here, and he encouraged me to move forward in the fire service.”
With his job in the fire service, Lewis prides himself on the public education division of McDuffie County Fire and EMS, a division he leads.
According to the McDuffie County website, the public education division’s goal is to inform and educate the public in fire and life safety because the best response to accidents and injury is not in a big fire truck or ambulance but prevention through education and information sharing.
Some of the public education tools used by McDuffie Fire and EMS include the fire safety house, an interactive experience for children ages 5-10 to help them learn safe practices in their home in the event of a fire; Freddie the Fire Truck, a child-size fire truck that interacts with children to deliver a fire safety message; friendly firefighter presentations in which a firefighter begins in his normal uniform and slowly dresses in turnout gear to show the kids that firefighters are friendly; and a mini fire truck just for fun.
The fire department also provides CPR and first aid classes as well as child care professional fire safety training courses for adults. Lewis also teaches local industries, businesses, schools and other organizations how to properly operate fire extinguishers and how to maintain them.
FOR ADDITIONAL DETAILS, see the full story in the April 6, 2017, issue of The McDuffie Progress. To have The McDuffie Progress delivered to your home or business each week, simply call 706-595-1601 to subscribe. Or, follow the link on our home page to subscribe.